The Resurrection Men
by Red Fiona
Summary: He knows too much to let the Valkyries take them easily.
Title: The Resurrection Men

Author: Red Fiona

Fandom: Too Human

Characters: Medic

Ratings/Warnings/Etc: 15 gen fic. Canonical levels of violence and character death.

Summary: He knows too much to let the Valkyries take them easily.

* * *

He's been the medic for the Wolves for too long.

Then again, he said that after his first skirmish on their team.

He owes the Aesir another five years of his life, and he doesn't think they care if he's sane or alive by the end of it.

He keeps those thoughts to himself though, he knows what happens to those who stand against the Aesir, and what punishments the gods meet out.

It's not faith when your gods live in a city above your heads.

Are they even gods if you know they're real, and you know how their augmentation works?

He definitely keeps those thoughts to himself. The Aesir tolerate a certain amount more of dissention and disbelief from the medics than they do from the rest of their soldiers, because there's fewer of them and they're harder to replace, but not that much more. He has no intention of being caught by Heimod. Nor does he agree with Loki and the Helheim traitors. No, he's agnostic on the matter, he distrusts them all equally, saving a special fear of Idunn. He has been to her laboratory, and seen things no mortal man should.

He fears that the workings of the Aesir and efforts of their Valkyries make their commanders less careful with their soldiers's lives than they should be. He doesn't include Baldur in this general condemnation. Baldur is gentle, Baldur is kind. Baldur understands his men are not gods as he is, and protects them where he can.

There was no helping some of them, Bjorn would probably be just as bad if he believed death was the end and that there would be no coming back from it nor a seat in the great hall of Valhalla waiting for them, but some of the Wolves, they're so young, he feels a special responsibility to them, an extra guilt about their deaths.

Because that's what it is, no matter what the Aesir say. Even those men whose bodies aren't used for spare parts are changed by the process.

He knows why the reconstituted soldiers get put in different units when they return. They say it's pure chance, but it's not.

He was lucky enough to be counted as clever amongst his fellows when he studied medicine, and was selected to study further along a specialised path. He was to study cybernetics. He excelled again, so much so that Idunn herself chose him to work by her side.

The work horrified him.

Not the blood, he was inured. Not the cybernetics, he was fascinated. It was that when they were finished with the men they worked on, they not the men they started out with. It's not the treatment that revolts him, a lot of the injured would be dead without it, it's more than necessary, it's vital, but he cannot stand the lies that go with it.

They're told to say that the soldier that comes out of the process is the same as the one that the unit remembers from before the battle.

Of course they aren't.

Basic cybernetics don't alter personalities, anyone who says otherwise is a puppet of the anti-technology protesters. But the more invasive work they do, to repair someone who is basically dead and needed all of those cybernetics just to survive, that changes people out of all recognition. It's not that they're not people any more, they've got all the abilities and recall and soul (if you believe in those, and he's not sure he does any more, not after the mission in Helheim) that normal people did. But it's not the same version of those things that they had before. Things have been altered, sections of brain split and spliced and plugged with wiring until the person is alive again, and able to have autonomic and controlled functions, and it's just not the same person that comes out that went in. Originally, back before he'd even started med school, they fed the enhanced soldiers back into the same squad they came from. The men rebelled, horrified at these men who looked like their friends, who pretended to be their old friends, but weren't them in some indescribable way.

So the rotation policy was introduced, and every enhanced soldier was placed with a new unit. And the thing of it was, once everyone else got over the shock of their being someone new, and them having cybernetic attachments, the "new" soldiers made friends, got treated exactly like any other soldier. Completely human.

If the cybernetics had been just that little bit more advanced, then that would be an end to it. But they weren't. Because sometimes the enhanced soldiers got seriously injured again and had to be rebuilt from the ground up. You'd think that there would be a way to save the previous personality, given how much wiring was already involved, but there wasn't and the soldier would be moved on again to another new unit. He doesn't know what happens when they run out of units.

That knowledge, of the how and the why, and that the rotation policy has more to do with the effects of the surgery than it does battlegroup efficiency, it sits heavily on him. It makes him strain harder to save his men, enough that he has a reputation as the medic who the Valkyries have to almost fight to get take the casualties from. He hears the other soldiers talking about him sometimes, with the newer ones asking why, and the older ones coming up with reasons. None of them are the right one, but they are reasons. Of all the people, it's Bjorn's answer that comes closest to the truth. Bjorn tends to smile, grab the new Wolf, or less commonly the new Bear, that is asking the question around the shoulders, and say, "we none of us like to leave a mission half done, do we now?"

That's not quite it, but it's near enough. He's a doctor, even in the midst of all of this, and he has a duty of care to the men in his unit, not the gods or the men who'd profit from their organs or the enhanced soldiers the men in his unit could become. He had to try to save them, even from the Valkyries.

* * *

End notes: Longer end notes than usual, sorry about that.

I am one of the three people sad that there was never a second game in the Too Human series. Yes, everything you may have heard about the gameplay being repetitive is true. But oh the world-building. It's fantastic. It does some interesting things with Norse mythology and I wanted to know if they were going to follow up some of the hints about spoilery character, and the apparent conspiracy.

That being said, what the medic, whose canonical name is Siegmund, does and how the game manual explains it makes no sense, so I wrote this as my version of his backstory, and to follow up on the hints of body horror the game has.


End file.
